Ecommerce companies’ team requirements in the first six months

What follows is a generalised model for startup team building. Every company is, of course, different, but using this model as a starting point will, I hope, be helpful.

Team structure in early stage ecommerce and marketplace companies is a function of manpower and skills necessary to build the company and the founder(s)’ skillset(s). Companies with lots of cash sometimes add people more quickly, but that drives the burn rate up, often without a compensating increase in the chance of success..

In the first couple of months the focus should be on making sure the idea is valid, requiring the following activities:

Development of the company vision and strategy

Search for a point of deep emotional resonance with customers – research work

First iteration of the product vision

First iteration of company messaging

Design and development of landing pages and prototypes

Finding the first few customers

Items 1 and 2 should be done by founders and require generic business skills. Items 3-6 are more specialised and can be done by founders if they have the necessary product, development and marketing experience, otherwise they need outside help. The development requirement might be full time, or approaching full time, but the product, design and marketing requirements are part time. As a guide, the companies that we work with at this early stage generally need around 10 hours per week of product work, 20 hours per week of design and 5 hours of marketing, but there’s a lot of week on week volatility.

The minimum team to move quickly for these first couple of months is a full time founder, a full time developer (or FTE), and part time product, design and marketing support. Bigger teams move faster but overall efficiency can suffer.

The next few months should then be about the product – proving that the idea can captured in a product that resonates with customers. The key activities at this point are:

Develop version one of the product – strong enough to scale

Build deep understanding of early adopters

Develop brand values and core messaging

Build version one of the visual identity

Get into the habit of month on month growth

Start tracking key metrics and build a company dashboard

Operational activities to support growth

The man hour requirements for this product step will be the same as for the idea step, but with another 0.5-1 developers, double the marketing time (now circa 10 hours per week), and then sufficient interns and customer service people to cover the operations. A lot of the operational activities will fall to the founder, but it’s common to have 1-2 interns or early hires at this time. It’s important by this point to have someone numerate on the team. Also, early hires should be capable of dealing with ambiguity and fuzzy role definitions.

I’m writing this post in part to get my thoughts straight ahead of a conversation with a founder we’d like to back who is weighing up the pros and cons of working with Forward Partners vs building her own team. As a reminder, we bundle talent and office space with cash when we invest in companies, allowing the founder to spend more time working on the company and less time hiring. One of the other benefits is that companies can dial up and down the time they need from us more easily than they can with freelancers or employees. And the quality of our team is awesome.

A company should, of course, get it’s own team pretty quickly. We help with the tough problems of finding developers on day zero and resourcing part time roles with varying time requirements. And then we help with talent acquisition too (recruiting is difficult!), so companies get started fast and become self sufficient within six months. We’ve also seen our companies able to save money by hiring for talent over experience and leveraging the experience in our team to bring people quickly up to speed.

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Shout out to Matt Buckland, Head of Talent at Lyst for his comments on an earlier draft.